Teradata's Response to COVID-19

The health of our employees, our families, our communities and our customers is paramount in these unprecedented times. As COVID-19 (Coronavirus) spreads rapidly around the world, we are taking every necessary measure to protect our employees. At the same time, we are working hard to ensure the support of our customers’ business needs, and the communities around the world where we live and work.

Teradata’s pandemic response team convenes daily and is engaged around the clock to determine and direct actions in this fluid situation. We are watching health advisories where we operate around the world to stay up to date with best practices and are following federal and local government directives. In every case, we are leaning in and taking measures across the board to help people stay healthy and out of harm’s way.

As a well-established partner to leading brands around the world, Teradata is also determined to support our customers through this crisis. Our Go-to-Market teams remain trusted advisors to our customers and are staying in regular contact in the most appropriate ways; more and more customers are requesting video or tele-conferencing as they too adjust in this challenging time. Our support teams are engaging each customer to arrange remote maintenance and high-quality support wherever possible. Keeping our trusted service employees safe, along with our customers’ operations teams, will remain our priority as we continue our tradition of world-class support.

More specifically, the breadth of actions we have underway to respond to this global challenge include:

Teradata associates around the world are working from home
Teradata associates are working from home to help in stopping the spread of the virus, be closer to their loved ones and practice social distancing in order to prevent spreading the virus for the greater good of our society. We understand and fully support people need to ensure their families stay safe and healthy, and we want to help. We have enabled our employees to bring home office items home to help them work virtually. We understand households may now have many people working virtually as well as children and elderly family members in their homes. We believe with patience and flexibility there is nothing we will not be able to manage. We have always had a large population of our people working virtually, which makes us feel confident we have the infrastructure in place and can operate successfully in this environment.

When exceptions are requested and granted, it is only in support of caring for customers and after careful consideration of the health and safety of our people.

Limiting travel to limit the reach of the virus
One of the best ways to limit the spread of the virus is to correspondingly limit business travel, and we are taking precautionary steps here. Travel for internal meetings has ceased and our teams have transitioned to virtual meetings throughout the world. Aligned with our commitment to customers, critical customer travel will be allowed, after we are assured that both our people and our customers’ people are well protected. We are further following government advisories and have ceased all travel—internal and external—where prohibited.

Keeping our employees informed and engaged
We have established multiple communication channels to keep our employees informed as developments unfold. We fully recognize informative and frequent updates to the organization is now more important than ever and are making it a priority. Additionally, our Teradata culture inspires two-way dialog and it is refreshing to see the positive encouragement and helpful tips being shared from our teams around the world.

Executing business continuity plans
We are also executing and continually refining our plans to ensure we maintain customer support service levels and response times. We are reassuring our customers that their managed service engagements and service experience activities will continue and also are working out arrangements that both support the customer and protect the health of our associates. We have identified and tested key critical business processes and have geographically dispersed data centers, operations centers and spare parts.

Embracing the virtual world
We have quickly transitioned our marketing events to be entirely virtual experiences through the first half of the year, keeping our awareness and demand efforts moving forward. Coupled with our information-rich website, customers can continue to experience the power of our unmatched hybrid-cloud analytics solutions.

We believe the best way to tackle this unprecedented health crisis is together as a global community. Teradata is committed to putting the health of our employees and customers first. We operate in more than 40 countries around the globe—this is our community and we will do all we can to come through this together.

These are unprecedented and concerning times. Remember we are all in this together. We must never stop looking out for one another. Please practice social distancing and remember to take care of yourselves as well as one another.

(Author):

Kathy Cullen-Cote

Kathy Cullen-Cote is Teradata’s Chief Human Resources Officer. In this role, she is responsible for the corporation’s talent strategies and programs and leads a global team of human resource professionals responsible for recruiting, compensation, benefits, equity programs, employee engagement and retention, and employee relations. Additionally, she guides Teradata’s learning and development efforts.

With more than 30 years of experience in all facets of human resources, Kathy is a skilled leader in building a robust culture of employee engagement, creating and guiding execution of human resources programs, and enhancing the employee experience.

Kathy joins Teradata from PTC, a Boston-based software company, where she was serving as EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer. At PTC, she served in HR roles of increasing responsibility as she guided the organization’s growth through cultural transformation programs, global employee engagement initiatives, and the implementation and adoption of cutting-edge HR systems. Prior to PTC, she served in HR leadership roles at Johnson and Johnson, Raytheon, Imark Communications and Barry Controls. Kathy was recently awarded the 2018 HR Leadership Forum Bob Gatti HR Leadership Excellence Award.

Related Posts

Excerpted & editorialized interview of Dr. Hani Mahmassani of Northwestern University and Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata, and their discussion of how companies are using real-time data for scenario crunching, such as supply chain risk assessment.